Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Note on Ellipses
- Introduction
- 1 Jean Rhys and Her Critics
- 2 Feminist Approaches to Jean Rhys
- 3 The Caribbean Question
- 4 Writing in the Margins
- 5 Autobiography and Ambivalence
- 6 ‘The Day They Burned the Books’
- 7 Fort Comme La Mort: the French Connection
- 8 The Politics of Good Morning, Midnight
- 9 The Huge Machine of Law, Order and Respectability
- 10 Resisting the Machine
- 11 The Enemy Within
- 12 Good night, Day
- 13 Intemperate and Unchaste
- 14 The Other Side
- 15 The Struggle for the Sign
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
6 - ‘The Day They Burned the Books’
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Biographical Outline
- Abbreviations and References
- Note on Ellipses
- Introduction
- 1 Jean Rhys and Her Critics
- 2 Feminist Approaches to Jean Rhys
- 3 The Caribbean Question
- 4 Writing in the Margins
- 5 Autobiography and Ambivalence
- 6 ‘The Day They Burned the Books’
- 7 Fort Comme La Mort: the French Connection
- 8 The Politics of Good Morning, Midnight
- 9 The Huge Machine of Law, Order and Respectability
- 10 Resisting the Machine
- 11 The Enemy Within
- 12 Good night, Day
- 13 Intemperate and Unchaste
- 14 The Other Side
- 15 The Struggle for the Sign
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Miscellaneous Endmatter
Summary
I want now to turn to Rhys’ short story ‘The Day They Burned the Books’, in which the anomalies and ambiguities of her colonial experience are compellingly etched. She wrote this story, in which she looks back to the Dominica of her childhood, during the years when she was working on Wide Sargasso Sea, though it was published six years earlier. ‘The Day They Burned the Books’ dramatizes the fraught racial tensions among which she grew up, and suggests how that colonial conflict influenced her evolution as a writer. The title of this island story evokes Caliban's frustrated plot to burn Prospero's books, the source of his mastery and power, and at one level this is a story about the rejection of colonialism. But the story is also, and more specifically, about how the children of colonialism deal with their inheritance of love and hate, of cultural riches and cultural chains. Yet more specifically again, it is about how Rhys has become the kind of writer she is. The story is set around the turn of the century, when colonials did not expect England's place as motherland and touchstone of civilization to be questioned, and is told by an unnamed white Creole girl, twelve at the time of the story. Like other of Rhys’ stories, though written as reminiscence from an unspecified later date, it is told with the child's eye, as a cluster of vivid memories, a strategy which allows Rhys’ writing imagistic immediacy as well subtle shifts and juxtapositions. The narrator's friend Eddie, small, consumptive and precocious, is the son of an Englishman, Mr Sawyer, agent for a steamship line, who has settled on the island for no apparent or determinate reason. Mr Sawyer doesn't fit in with the colonials because he isn't ‘a gentleman’ – drops his h's in fact. He has married a ‘coloured woman’, pretty and ‘nicely educated’, but he treats her insultingly and callously (TABL 37). His wife never complains, in public pretending it is a joke – ‘this mysterious, obscure, sacred, English joke’; but the black maid Mildred says the wife's eyes have ‘gone wicked, like a soucriant's eyes’ (TABL 38).
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- Jean Rhys , pp. 39 - 44Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012